


Early Development

by Ylevihs



Series: How Not to Fall [47]
Category: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén
Genre: Implied Violence, Implied abuse, Minor OC - Freeform, Spoilers, Therapy Session, headcanon heavy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:01:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23428894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ylevihs/pseuds/Ylevihs
Summary: You can't pick your family
Series: How Not to Fall [47]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1327892
Comments: 1
Kudos: 17





	Early Development

“In our last session,” she began, “I think we were able to touch on something important, Richard,” every word was a hesitant step through an unmapped field of land mines. Every syllable a gentle tip toe before the weight of her voice would follow it through. Pressing in with cautious heels.

She didn’t want to frighten him. Upset him. Set him off. Someone had been rereading the chapters on childhood development in the psych books. Who knew if it would help? It’s not like he’d ever been an actual child.

“You think so?” Richard felt his fingers beginning to twist and forced them into stillness. Tried to. They fought back and before he realized he was doing it; Dr. Finch had realized he was doing it. Blunt fingernails not quite digging into the backs of his knuckles.

Dr. Finch paused at the sight and then nodded, waiting to see if the loose pile of earth in front of her held any danger to them both, before pressing on. “I do think so,” crossing her legs and laying her clipboard flat over her knee. “The things that happen when we’re very young can affect us for years. Our whole lives,” a lingering pause and it wasn’t hard to see the lines of her thought moving steadily down the path. “If you’re up for it, I think going over what you remember from your early childhood could be helpful,” Help fill in the empty spaces on her mental map of Richard’s needs. That for the longest time, and the foreseeable future, said only ‘here there be dragons’.

A faint tapping on his shoulder. Something from a darker corner of his mind, angry that he hadn’t erased that entire session from her mind. He hadn’t dipped his fingers in and ripped away his confessions—half honest or otherwise—and now it was too late. Too much time had passed and now she had all these questions filling up into a neat little firing squad. All of them aiming at his head. Richard swallowed a sound that tasted like a scream.

Too late to go back now. “Alright,” and at least one of them was pleased with that answer. Her pen perked up between her fingers, ready for business.

“Alright,” gentle. Encouraging. “I want to start with the earliest memory you have,”

Richard felt the world dip out from under him, sending his stomach dropping to his ankles. Aw beans, he couldn’t do this. He. It was showing on. Not on his face. She wasn’t paying attention to his face, it was his hands, clawing at one another. No blood yet. He slipped them under his legs, sitting on them like a squirming child in class.

Right. Earliest memory. He could do that easily. But how to package it for her? How to.

Right. So.

“I think…I mean I remember bits and pieces of it,” it’s an easy lie. He could remember every second from the first moment the incubation fluid had been drained away and air punched down into his diaphragm. Dr. Finch nodded, face carefully blank. Eyes still darting down to his hands. Thoughts still darting down to his hands.

“That’s alright, Richard, any part that you can recall,” she shifted in her chair, pen very smoothly writing down that he was agitated but not distressed. Uncomfortable with memories from his childhood. Ha. She didn’t know the half of it. Maybe she was about to get a portion, though. All up to him to actually tell her.

“I’m…I think I was at a doctor’s office,” trailing. It wasn’t entirely wrong. And it was a lie he could work with if he put in some effort. “And I must have been pretty young, because I remember the doctor talking with my mother, but not to me at all,” tried to stop the moniker from taking on too much acid. Hopefully he succeeded. Finch didn’t seem to note anything odd about how he said it.

“Do you think you were sick?”

“No,” ah. “I think it was,” a normal physical, he wanted to say. It would have been close enough. Would have meant the same things. The words caught in his throat. “I was hurting. But I don’t remember how,” six of one, half dozen of the other. Dr. Finch nodded patiently.

“Do you remember if the doctor seemed upset? Or if your mother did?” not wanting to assume the worst, but Dr. Finch’s mind was leaving that magazine on the table, just in case Richard wanted to pick it up.

Richard shook his head once before realizing that wasn’t a clear enough answer for her. “They both seemed fine, I think,” both had been business like. Professional. Inspecting his body to see if there were any mutations from the hero drug that their initial scans had missed. Checking to see that the physical development had gone as planned and there wasn’t some part of him that had failed. And then Dr. Finch asked something he didn’t hear. “What?”

“I asked what sort of lollipop they gave you afterwards,” with a patient smile. Clearly, she’d been trying to set him at ease.

“Why would they have given me a lollipop?” Richard asked before he could stop himself. It was the wrong thing to ask; Dr. Finch’s pen began a looping scribble. Her thoughts bunched up gently around that answer. That he had been able to remember that he was hurt and at a doctor’s office, but not the positive memory of receiving candy.

“Most pediatricians will hand out small sweets, to reinforce to children that going to the doctor isn’t something to be afraid of,”

“Oh,”

A blank pause from the both of them.

And then “Did you go to the doctor frequently as a child?”

“Yes,” he winced. He hadn’t meant his answer to be so blunt. Or so quick. Dr. Finch nodded and chewed her lower lip, carefully inspecting the earth before her feet to see where she could take another step forward. A tip toe into the dirt.

“Let’s…Let’s go in a different direction,” she began. “I still want to address your childhood,” not a question but giving him an implied exit. A chance to say that he didn’t want to continue. Richard sighed and let his twitching hands out from under his thighs, folding them into his lap. “Were you punished often when you were young?”

“Only if I needed to be,” tried to be vaguer and only ended up sending her pen flying over the page. He could feel the next question loading itself behind her teeth. “It was physical sometimes,” he shot first, cutting her off. Dreading to give her the chance to ask what behavior needed to be punished. “But not always,”

There was a tissue box on the table. Dr. Finch watched with silent interest as he plucked one from the box and let his fingers fiddle with the tissue. Something to do that wasn’t tearing up the skin on either hand. His knee wanted to bounce, but the ache in his hip was still there from physical therapy the day before.

She had a few questions jostling one another for a chance to fire the next round. Richard peeked in and saw the two leading the charge in a dead heat were what sort of punishments and what sort of transgressions.

Something must have shown on his face, because her attention had left his hands and was back up. “The punishments that weren’t physical,” she began slowly, carefully adjusting the way that toe was coming down before pressing solidly down. “What were they like?”

“Bed without dinner,” he shrugged, “Which wasn’t always a bad thing,” amending it. No way he could tell her about that. Saying that the food wasn’t good was a lie even he couldn’t make himself swing. Not in this place. “Sent to my room without being able to see anyone else,” a minor hesitation. “Locked in, and given a talking to,”

Dr. Finch saw a glint of metal amongst the loose earth. “When you say, ‘anyone else’, who do you mean?” her head tilted slightly and the pen slowed, no longer jotting down questions. Not wanting the distractions of extra movement. Physical or otherwise. Even her thoughts were slowing down a bit. “Do you have siblings?” they’d never discussed that. At least, they never had that Dr. Finch could remember.

“Not full brothers and sisters,” Richard allowed. Half siblings? Ha. Sure. That could work for the story he was telling her. “But there were other children around. I…I don’t want to talk about them right now,”

“You didn’t get along?” she prompted anyway, and Richard could feel her disappointment in herself for asking. Good.

“They hated me,” too hard. Too harsh. Dr. Finch had the decency to clear her throat. He let the sigh leave his lungs. “They thought I was spying on them, and if they misbehaved, I would tell her on them. And they’d get punished. So, they hated me. Wished I would go away or die,”

Dr. Finch paused, looking back down at where his hands were slowly shredding the tissue. There was a lot to unpack with that statement and her mind was looking around for places to put everything. Being labeled as a tattle tale was about wanting approval from adults. Accepting exclusion from a group of peers in favor of preferential treatment from an authority figure. Usually only sought after if the child in question already felt alienated, was already being pushed to the edges of the social circle. And from what Richard had said, his mother had been encouraging the divide. “I’m sure they didn’t really want that,”

“Good for you,” sour tasting. “I’m glad you’re sure,” an unfair response. She could only work with what he gave her, after all.

The pen stopped entirely. An apology was drifting through her head. He didn’t want it. Whatever he’d done with his face. Ah, glaring. Great. Dr. Finch wasn’t too put off by it; her thoughts readjusted and reloaded.

“Did you feel the same dislike for them?” Which, alright, that was a fair question. One that should have been easy to answer. Should have been. Just a simple one syllable reply and. And.

“I was afraid of some of them,” acidic in his throat, burning a bit at the back of his tongue. “but I never knew them well enough to hate them,” there was. Oh, an iron taste in his mouth. He hadn’t realized he’d been biting at his cheek. Swallowed hard and Dr. Finch set the clipboard down on the table. There was a lot in that piece of baggage as well. What did it mean to not know one’s siblings well enough? Nothing good, she was sure. But the lack of animosity on his end was piquing her interest as well; more than she could help it.

“You never felt any anger at them for treating you like they might not want you around?”

“No,” with a snort he couldn’t stop. “It’s not like I could blame them for hating me,” not wanting to say anything more but not able to stop his mouth from continuing. “Especially after I was the one who managed to run away, even if I did get brought back,”

“You think they wanted to run away as well?”

Not all of them. He knew more than a few Regenes who had come into their own under the Farm’s guidance. Who had drunk the Kool-Aid with more gusto than he had ever managed. But there was still a wide swatch of them. Those who had really seen the outside. Who had been given a chance to dream about what being a human might be like. They’d wanted it. And even though he’d been brought back, broken and bleeding, there had still been pulses of envy from the people who knew that he’d tasted freedom.

“They wanted to…even when they found me and took me home, they still wanted to,” and with all the caution of a soldier realizing that their next step will absolutely land on a mine, on a mental clipboard filled with tiny, neat scribbles, Richard saw Dr. Finch write down a word and circle it. Very slowly. 

-

Whoever she was, she wasn’t used to fighting someone as unpredictable as Lady Argent. Which, to be fair, neither had Mad Dog. At least he’d had the years as Sidestep to help with muscle memory. Had the ability to at least see a seconds glimpse at where the next hit would come from.

The regene—what was her name? Regina had called her something. A place holder so that people wouldn’t pick up on it in public that the woman wasn’t human. She had tried to rush after Daniel as he flew away. Meaning that whatever she was tracking was likely in Regina herself. At least in her clothes.

And as she had gotten distracted, Lady Argent had landed a solid round house kick to her skull. Hard enough to drive her to the ground and crack the pavement. She wasn’t dead, Richard could see her limbs sluggishly trying to obey the signals from her brain. Trying to get up. To get away. To give chase and save her skin from whatever punishment the Farm had in store for her once her body was recovered. Argent was having none of it. There was enough time for him to see Argent sharpening her claws for something and for his chest to tighten in guilt and pity for the regene on the ground.

He shouldn’t have felt grateful that Lady Argent’s attention was elsewhere, but it was difficult not to be. The computer in his arms was awkward and heavy, even with the suit taking most of the load. A fight with Lady Argent wouldn’t end well for him now; the risk of damaging the computer was more than enough to send him jetting away around the back of the building. Blasting out with the Rat King’s help that there was nothing to see there.

The commlink inside the helmet purred as he brought up Bo’s number; he shouldn’t have been too far away yet. Hopefully close enough to help give Richard a ride to Ranger’s Headquarters without getting the attention of the entire city. He couldn’t afford a fight. Couldn’t waste time with the LDPD or with the silver Ranger.

Boris’ voice crackled at first and then streamed in clear through the speakers. “Boss? Everything okay back there?”

“No. I need a ride,” a quiet electronic noise. And then a hard sound from Bo’s end of the call.

“On it.” The engine starting up was strong and sent a small wave of relief through Richard’s shoulders. “I’ll be right there,” hadn’t gone far. 

Well. Hopefully that would be quick enough. Back around the front of the building, he could feel the thoughts of the Regene getting stronger. She wasn’t getting any closer, still pinned down by whatever Argent was doing to her, but her distress was rising. Fear. Pain. Panic. The overwhelming, frozen marrow deep, no. No. Don’t let this happen. Couldn’t let this happen. Not even asking for help. Never having been given any and not knowing how to beg. Even for mercy. Not knowing how to give up. Neither had ever been an option for him either, before. Before he’d.

Fuck.

He couldn’t. That was not a potential ally getting her face ground into the pavement. That was an enemy. Not the enemy, though. But she. But. Didn’t deserve. Could handle Argent. Could handle pain or prison but no regene he’d ever known deserved to be sent back the farm.

Richard was halfway through setting the computer down when Boris roared through the alley way. Barely skidding to a halt before the passenger side door was flung open. The Rat King moved his legs for him and before Richard could process it, the door was closed. His seatbelt was on? Bo was driving. And whoever his nameless sister was, she was left to her own defenses.

He fought the urge to look in the rear-view mirror to see if there was any sign of the two fighters and instead let himself sink into something ugly.


End file.
